Young Folks' History of England eBook

Now, Duchess Sarah had brought to the palace, to help
to wait on the queen, a poor cousin of her own, named
Abigail Masham, a much more smooth and gentle person,
but rather deceitful. When the mistress of the
robes was unkind and insolent, the queen used to complain
to Mrs. Masham; and by-and-by Abigail told her how
to get free. There was a gentleman, well known
to Mrs. Masham—­Mr. Harley, a member of
Parliament and a Tory, and she brought him in by the
back stairs to see the queen, without the duchess
knowing it. He undertook, if the queen would
stand by him, to be her minister, and to turn out the
Churchills and their Whig friends, send away the tyrant
duchess, and make peace, so that the duke might not
be wanted any more. In fact, the war had gone
on quite long enough; the power of the King of France
was broken, and he was an old man, whom it was cruel
to press further; but this was not what Anne cared
about so much as getting free of the duchess.
There was great anger and indignation among all the
Whigs at the breaking off the war in the midst of
so much glory; and, besides, the nation did not keep
its engagements to the others with whom it had allied
itself. Marlborough himself was not treated as
a man deserved who had won so much honor for his country,
and he did not keep his health many years after his
fall. Once, when he felt his mind getting weak,
he looked up at his own picture at Blenheim, taken
when he was one of the handsomest, most able, and
active men in Europe, and said sadly, “Ah! that
was a man.”

Mr. Harley was made Earl of Oxford, and managed the
queen’s affairs for her. He and the Tories
did not at all like the notion of the German family
of Brunswick—­Sophia and her son George—­who
were to reign next, and they allowed the queen to
look towards her own family a little more. Her
father had died in exile, but there remained the young
brother whom she had disowned, and whom the French
and the Jacobites called King James III. If
he would have joined the English Church Anne would
have gladly invited him, and many of the English would
have owned him as the right king; but he was too honest
to give up his faith, and the queen could do nothing
for him.

Till her time the Scots—­though since James
I. they had been under the same king as England—­had
had a separate Parliament, Lords and Commons, who
sat at Edinburgh; but in the reign of Queen Anne the
Scottish Parliament was united to the English one,
and the members of it had to come to Westminster.
This made many Scotsmen so angry that they became
Jacobites; but as every body knew that the queen was
a gentle, well-meaning old lady, nobody wished to
disturb her, and all was quiet as long as she lived,
so that her reign was an unusually tranquil one at
home, though there were such splendid victories abroad.
It was a time, too, when there were almost as many
able writers as in Queen Elizabeth’s time.
The two books written at that day, which you are
most likely to have heard of, are Robinson Crusoe,
written by Daniel Defoe, and Alexander Pope’s
translation of Homer’s Iliad.